


hallowed be thy name

by isoboto



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Italian Mafia, M/M, Mafia AU, nico is an emo boy leave him alone
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:14:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22131619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isoboto/pseuds/isoboto
Summary: You grew up hearing his name coming out of your father’s mouth plenty more than your own name.
Relationships: Bianca di Angelo & Nico di Angelo, Maria di Angelo/Hades, Nico di Angelo & Hades, Nico di Angelo/Percy Jackson
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22





	hallowed be thy name

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OurToxicPhan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OurToxicPhan/gifts).



> _Prompt: Percy was the son of Poseidon. He was the son of Hades._  
>  Nico knew his feelings for Percy could never lead anywhere.
> 
> _At least up until Percy pushed him up against the wall and kissed him._
> 
> Me: look at the given tags and laugh in pain at how far off I am to the recipient's request

**I.** You grew up hearing his name coming out of your father’s mouth plenty more than your own name. The  _ s _ ’s slithered and hissed with venom and disdain like the clipped, harsh sounds of silver utensils clicked against china during your family dinnertime. You remembered hating it the more it grew on you. Hated every crooks and cranny burrowed between each consonant, hated how the familiar Latin syllables hamfistedly fit together to form something that neither belonged to the past nor this century.

Your father’s frown appeared only when they talked about him. The smooth spots between his brows and mouth began to line with a haunting expression of paranoia and worry as though the ages finally caught up, and you started watching your father watching him, distantly aware your existence began to ebb from your father’s peripheral vision into the shadow, replaced by a boy haloed by guts and gore. Sometimes, the sight of your father gripping Perseus Jackson, fiercely whispering to him, didn’t glance up at your direction or call out to you even when you scuffed your feet on the way back to your room late. You didn’t mention the guillotine hanging over your family’s head, nor the fruitless assimilation effort. And you never asked why his father would care so much, why was it important whether the orphaned boy should feel comfortable with them when his safety meant their own lives were in danger, why was it important for your father, out of all people, helped the boy forgave his parents’ murderer even though it was not his father’s responsibility to ensure those happened. You watched him watched you, peculiarly aware how his irises dig into hollow of your neck, the open curve of your throat— _ assessing, calculating _ . You watched him watched you the same way your father watched him.

You could feel your family dynamic consciously, carefully, shifted around the new presence, tiptoeing around the gaping hole that was only eating itself bigger. Against the newfound terse tranquillity with him, the ever-tentative manoeuvre and interaction, every note was too loud, too crass. Breath turned guarded and wary. Laughter echoed and distorted, trying and failing to fill up the vacuum. Your family knew the value of silence, but the addition of an outsider—an enemy—destabilized the deliberate politeness between them. It set your teeth on edge, and the childhood home you had already outgrowing became suffocating. Just the knowledge that he could be standing where you were, touching what you touched, breathing what you breathed, tracking your movements even in your sleep made your nerves crawled. The way Bianca called him  _ Pericolo _ , the way your mother called him  _ Cosa Dolce _ , their accent sweetened the words made you felt nauseous. What started as a dreamt returned more and more often until it was a routine for you thrashed awake from your fitful sleep, dreamt of hands crushing windpipe and weight compressing atop your ribs, your own fingers and nails clawed deep, angry, red welts into your facial skin, tears seared in your blood. Everything was in a cage. A cage within a cage within a cage. In this house, in this cage, you were a trapped insect.

  
  
  
  
  


**II.** You began to disappear.

Not many people knew Ade’s son or daughter’s face. They only knew his adopted son’s face, knew the orphaned boy and his ties with the once-a-legend Poseidónas mafia. That served you fine. You could get away with anything, unlike your cousins, whose rebellious scandals were the city’s highlights of the week. Everybody knew Días’s children. However, nobody knew you. You were just another emo boy with daddy issues roaming the streets looking for cheap recognition, selling your body for dirty praises from strangers years older than you. No name, no worth, no strings.

You spent the autumn trawling along twisting endless roads, breathing the crisp air, chewing on plastic-like doughnuts and hanging out with kids from inner-city. Your black hair and black eyes made you virtually indistinguishable from them, despite your paler, ghastly complex. They didn’t mention the Giorgio Armani label inside your shirt, the Burberry trench coat, the posh heavy biker boots you wore, and you didn’t treat them to any fancy restaurant or buy them a new clothing article. You rarely caught any of them looking you weird. Though, you knew they felt irritated at the distance you firmly kept. Perhaps, they felt privileged to know  _ why _ . They started imposing themselves over to you, crowding in your space physically as though that would also get them inside your head. You let them fuss over you, laughing at the irony, and reinforced the walls around you.

At first, it was only till midnight, once or twice a month. You made sure you completed the homework beforehand and finished up the chores for Bianca. You snuck out at eight, when your parents were busily made the last phone calls on their list. Bianca turned a blind eye as you crept out the door and hurried down the street, jogging to catch the next bus on time. You shared joints if another kid happened to be working that day, but otherwise you were sitting on the curbs, drawing in the nicotine in painstaking inhales, practicing blowing smoke rings. You got picked up one time back then, getting paid for sloppy hand or blow jobs. You liked insipid bachelors who lived alone in a downtown loft., run-of-the-mill accountants or office workers, whose awkwardness and clumsiness reflected yours.

You learnt to carry a gun, a lighter, a pack of cigarettes and condoms on your body at all times. You learnt how to get down on your knees and pleasure a man. You learnt how to brace against walls and doors on your forearms, leaning the weight forward as if you were going for a headstand. You learnt to prod your bruises with your fingertips, turning mediocre yellow ribbons to a harsher green, prolonging the freckled purple spots that formed around your sharp, jutting hip bones and rib cages. Men with dull sedans picked you up at midnight and you walked back to the spot an hour later ready to pick up by the next one, nauseous at the semen aftertaste and sore at your thighs and the weight of your padded back pocket, sick of yourself. Then came the next sunset and you would be there, rinsing the whole night all over again. You smoked, you drank, you cried, you wandered. Some men were nice enough to offer driving you out to grab something to eat afterward. You’d go to the nearest McDonald’s, you ordered strawberry milkshakes and floppy fries. You bummed their joint and let them talked about family and taxes and corrupt politicians, and leaned on the warmed carhood, watching red and blue tail lights burnt up the sky. Although both of you were careful to put a five feet distance in between, each huddled in their respective little bubbles, aware of passerby’s prying eyes.

You often came back with your mother bundled up, reading, waiting for you. She didn’t needle it out of you explicitly, but the pain and betrayals splained on her face spoke for itself. She didn’t ask about it, but she never stop alluding until your father sharply cut in and told her to drop it. 

_ Let he lives his life. _

So you did. 

You became Mr. Hyde of your father’s Dr. Jekyll. You removed yourself from the family, leaving only a ghost fingerprints behind, and backslid into the darkside.

It was good.  _ Good, good, good. _ You felt lost, but you felt free. You were never high enough to ignored the way your mind and body were too serrated and unsated to the mental and physical mortal pain, but not sober enough to think of the blood dripping between your thighs.

  
  
  
  
  


**III.** The second night that you came back at three o’clock, you found your mother curling up on the couch, asleep.

She looked so small, only the top of her luscious curls visible, her frail frame rounded as her body unconsciously tried to burrow into the flimsy warmth provided by the plush fabric and knitted quilts. You eased the front door shut, hovered uncertainly, your palms wavered inches above your mother’s shivering shoulders, before jerking away. Your heels hammered on the floor in sync to your heart in your chest. You smelled like weed, like leaking beer bottles and decomposing trash and downtown darkest alleys—you smelled like everything you promised not to smell like, like everything your family feared to let you be. So you retreated, taking two-step at a time up the stairs, and paused at the top of the flight, staring down the empty hooded hallway. You weren’t sure what you were expecting, but there was an ugly, heavy lead ball rotting in the pit of your stomach by the time you crawled under the duvet of your bed.

Half-hope was the worst—either outcome left you angry and disappointed. You wanted your father to be there at the end of the hall, posing for  _ you  _ when you come home—just so you could brush him off, just so you could snarl in the face of his care and rode on the false ego, but at the same time you knew  _ if _ he was going to be there, he wouldn’t be there because he was worried about your health, or your self-destructive habits, or the claustrophobic panic attacks that ravaged your body days and nights. He would be there telling you to stop torturing people around you, to grow balls and actually running away and cutting off the ties permanently instead of this on-off dependency. You would snap first, face flamed by his cool indifference, and dragging in any and every fault you could reach. First, it was just general jabs at your father’s gullible, his trust, his so-called nobleness. Then, you’d say,  _ Showering your brother mafia son’s in care and love doesn’t make that he forgets about his little family’s bloody murder. Making him one of us doesn’t automatically make him just and forgiving. He’d be using us to gain his way to power, reel us in shady business just like his father did to the rest of this city, and when the time comes,  _ he  _ wouldn’t be the one that has a hard time putting a bullet between our eyes. _ Then, it would blow up into something else. Everything would careen sideways, an unstoppable catastrophe snowballing and crashing through the whole house the moment you brought up your father’s real motives. That he was only adopting this kid to prove himself a higher guy than his younger, richer brother in the political public eyes. That he was, in fact, an egoistic asshole that overestimated himself, one-track-mind and couldn’t comprehend what went beyond his actions. You never know what you were capable of spitting out in the heat of the moment, but you have a list of things you wanted to say.

Sometimes you imagine how would a fight between him and you broke out. You wondered if you would see his fist hit your nose, or if you wouldn’t even register the impact even when blood was streaming down your shirt and you were snorting back torn tissues and broken cartilage. You would probably laugh aloud, though,  _ humourous hysteria _ , realizing you probably said the wrong thing and realizing the cleavage between you and your father had now finally broken cleanly apart. You wondered if you would clench down and waited for his wrath to unfold, or if you would fight back, kicking and screaming and goading him until he beat you down to pulp.

You wouldn’t know. Because, most likely, in reality, your father would say nothing and let his silence argued for him.

  
  
  
  
  


**IV.** The grandfather clock mounted in the dining table tick-tocked, the singular beat echoed through the distilled space. The empty foyer seemed to twist and stretch every time you blinked.

You toed off your shoes and breathed out slowly, the last trace of nicotine still lingered in your lungs, leaving a bitter stench at the end of your tongue. You unzipped your coat, turning, startled when the darkness surged out the peripheral edge of your vision.

“ _ Sorella? _ ” You whispered, throat dry. The silhouette shifted, and you realized the shape was too define and linear to belong to his sister. For a second, your mouth parted and your breath stuttered to a still. “ _ Papà? _ ”

“You shouldn’t keep doing this,” The voice said. The barest of the light that slithered through the slits in the thick curtains only able to illuminate a part of his bowed lips. Blackness entrenched across the concave dales and slades of his face, embedded and serrated his calm, flat words into something more violent and callous.

Percy Jackson. 

You sneered. “I don’t need you to tell me what to do,  _ Perseus. _ ” You sidestepped, ready to shove him aside for the sake of it, when he continued.

“I’ve followed you for a while now,” He said, and you could feel your facial muscles immediately locked up at the inferred, caught between twitching down to an instinctive hiss or maintaining the mask of cool control.

“What do you want?” You snarled. The outlines of his mouth twisted microscopically. He raised his arm, fingers unfurling toward you like leaves reaching the sun and you steeled your spine against your body. You didn’t realize how hard were you digging your now-bared heels into the freezing floorboard, how hard were you grind down your teeth, how hard were your shoulders taunted up until his fingertips graced your bobbing Adam’s apple. 

You physically felt as though somebody had actually taped your eyelids open, forcing you to take in everything. He stepped in closer, crowding you back against the wall. His breath—warn and sour from sleep—fanned down your forehead, and you shook violently as his feather-light touch danced up the slim, pulsing columns of your neck and suddenly grabbed your chin with bruising force. You couldn’t breath, you couldn’t see. Your vision lapsed. And you realized: maybe,  _ maybe _ those dying dreams— _ dreams where hands broke your windpipe and weight snapped your ribs, fathom fingers and nails dug into your sides, and fears replaced your blood _ —dreams that you had been evaded for so long had finally caught up.

“I know things.” He pressed his lips against your ear, and mouthed the words against the soft curves. The wet moisture—of his lips, of his tongue—made every nerves under your skin jumped, and you bucked, trying to gain back the distance. “Be careful, Nico. Cover your track well,” You choked out an incoherent garble. “I’m not the only one watching over you, and I can’t protect you now. Everything you’re doing will cycle back eventually.”

Percy pulled back, vanished as though the shadow had engulfed him. His ghost footsteps whispered down the hall, and you flattened against the wall, willing your tremble to stop.

  
  
  
  
**V.** You didn’t listen to  _ Percy Jackson _ . Because it felt important to not obeyed his warning.

You stopped attending school. It felt inevitable. Yet, only you and your father seemed to find this unshocking.

When your consecutive absences totaled up and the VP was forced to call your parents, your mother drove home early with Bianca and scrubbed the city streets until they got a tip, and found you you hopping the train tracks that ran alongside Highway 47, the train hammering toward you screeching like a beast.

You looked over your shoulders more, perhaps, stuck with the main streets instead of back alleys.

But that was about it. Nothing came.

Then the last snowfall marked the first twist. 

You stumbled home at three in the morning, crashed on the foyer floor. You woke up with Bianca shaking and yelling your name, her voice wobbly and distorted as though she was yelling from the bottom of a lake. She sobbed when you audibly groaned, and hauled you up to a sitting position, and you were too bleary to scoff at her wincing at the thick odour of smoke and weed clinging to your skin. Everything ached. Your eyes were swollen shut, your lips bursted and bloated and your bones cracked, your nose clogged by dry blood. You lolled back to sleep to the feeling of your sister’s nimble hands and freezing fingertips roughly shoved up the hem of your shirt, her incessant babbling and sobbing turned into static. You probably gasped aloud, or maybe you didn’t. God, you didn’t know. 

The doctor said you would miss a week of school at least, but you didn’t bother to tell him you wouldn’t be missing anything, busily inventorying parts of your body. Wrists twisted out of the sockets, a few ribs snapped, and your straight, prideful Greek nose had now crooked, a glaring prominent dip with a bumpy outline. Your body a canvas of shades. You slept a lot. Because the other option was lying awake and recalling iron bars coming down across your back, hearing vocalized shame and self-hatred that accompanied the kicks to your gut, tasting fathom filthy cocks and bitter come in your mouth. The house was silent, oppressive and judgmental, the walls and ceiling sneering down at you. You overheard your father mused what the paparazzi would have to say, and you felt your skin burnt raw where the jeans had pooled around your knees as soon as a fraction of conscious surfaced and the flashes between black-outs, the clear, disgusting sound of flesh slapping against flesh rattled in your skull. You wanted to keep falling. Falling backward onto inky dreams and bleached exhaustion. You wanted to keep sleeping, because perhaps the next time you opened your eyes you'd forget about everything. Perhaps this was all a complex vision, perhaps you’d wake up at an alternative universe where Nico di Angelo was actually a normal, happy boy, enjoying his normal, happy life.

You turned your face into the pillow and screamed.

You slept for all the sleep that you lost. You wept in your dreams for the tears you didn’t shed in real life.

Your father came home early amidst the peak of the media surrounding you and homosexual and he himself.

You didn’t look at your father when he stalked into the room. 

He shut the door, paused, then turned the lock. The clean-cut  _ click _ of metal slotted into metal somehow made you breathed easier. His pupils flickered at just the right angle so that the light irises seemed to freeze over, vicious cold currents toiled underneath the thick glacier.

“How’s your face?”

You kept your back to him as you rolled to your side, swinging your legs over the side of the mattress. You clamped down on the involuntary hisses slipping past your clenched teeth as the battered ribs groaned with each of your movements. Your father said nothing, just stand there, not making any move, silent as death personified. His eyes roved across your body, and you almost raised your gaze to him in hope of catching a glimpse of  _ something _ passing in his obsidian pupils. Instead, you pressed the heels of your hands to your eye sockets, pushing the eyeballs back, white flared behind your eyelids.

There were painkillers Bianca left on your nightstand, but you hated the taste. The numbness. The fog that permated your brain.

“What did the news said?” 

“Things.” Your father said.

“Things,” You echoed.

He finally moved deeper into the room. He took off his jacket and draped it over your study chair, swiping a palm across the desk surface, and blew at the dust with an indiscernible expression. 

“Is it for the thrill? Adrenaline?” Your father said, still not looking at you. But you could trace the ugly twist of his mouth, cutting a line against the pale of his skin. “Are you trying to be rebellious to get some attention like a child?” 

“You didn’t seem care before.”

Your father snapped his head at you, gaze tightened. Your father looked elegant, god-like, a stronghold lighthouse standing still in this mess you were drowning in, and half of you wanted to cling to him and burst into tears and let the calm, even rumble of his breathing settled deep into your core and push you to the shore, yet half of you bitterly remarked that he wasn’t here for you or to be your father, he was here to tell you  _ You had screwed up my chance at winning this election against my brother _ .

You had heard mother talking. Zeus had taken the opportunity to jab at your father, raising seeds of doubts in the supporters. You, Percy, your mother. Anything. Everything.

Your father set his jaws, each syllable was its own word. “You’re my son. You honestly can’t expect me to stand aside in the face of this.”  _ You’re sick _ went unsaid.  _ You had tattered my reputation _ went unsaid.

“I’ll stop if you can stop Uncle Zeus from cheating on Aunt Hera.”

“This is not a joke.”

_ It isn’t _ , you wanted to say,  _ It’s in my DNA. _ Instead, you exhaled and inhaled slowly, wincing at every breath you take.

The room felt cold, despite the furnace kicking steadily since noon.

“I’ll send you and Percy to your Aunt Demetre’s farm once you’re healed. The city is too dangerous for you right now. Perhaps stay until summer comes. When things are safe again, I’ll bring you back.”

_ La felicità è condivisa, ma il dolore è tenuto segreto. _

“Okay?” Your father prompted.

You laid back down and curled on your side, facing the wall. His eyes drilled holes onto your back. Waiting. 

“Okay.” You said, as if he needed any affirmation from you.

**Author's Note:**

>  **FOLLOW ME**  
>    
> [Instagram: @faces.of.liars ](https://www.instagram.com/faces.of.liars/)  
> [Wattpad: @EPrescott ](https://www.wattpad.com/user/EPrescott)  
> [Tapas: @EPrescott ](https://tapas.io/EPrescott)


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